Some people think that we can learn a small number of high frequency words in a language and that will enable us to have meaningful conversations. This has never been Steve’s experience. We actually need to understand lot of words.
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In one video, Steve described a computer study done by grad students at some European university. The study tested several common languages. The result was that same in all of them: an ordinary sentence uses mostly high-frequency words, but also uses 1 or 2 less-frequent words.
That means if you learn all the most commmon 1,000 words, you know MOST of the words in each sentence. But you don’t know ALL of the words in any of the sentences.
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Actually, you do not need all the words in the sentence. Moreover, for some texts you need down to 30% of the words to understand what the text is about.
But, the language is not the number of the known words and learning the words would not make you a language speaker. You need to reorder your brain to consume the language grammar and structurise your thinking in a new way.
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